CJR has a fantastic interview with Michael Hudson on the origins of the financial crisis, and his background reporting on poverty issues becomes extremely relevant. It's one of the best resources I've seen, with about a dozen links to background stories …

… how many conservative chatterboxes have actually heard Pelosi's "hyper-partisan" speech (transcript, video). Maybe hyper-partisan speech is, like, subliminal, or something, but I don't see anything here to get all offended over. In her…

The difficulty is that if some of your products are cheap, you may lose money from customers who would willingly have paid more. So, businesses try to discourage their more lavish customers from trading down by making their cheap products look or sound …